From the day to day experience with GAIM I have found some things to be annoying. I list them here:

volume settings: You certainly need to have a different volume for GAIM than for other applications. I think this could be centralised. GAIM sounds can be very loud. You might also want to tweak this on per chat or per user basis. Also on IRC with high traffic you want it differentone 2one2 chats.

language setting: Nice if you do chat in different languages and use the text replacement plugin. So that “brb” can be something different in every language. This means that you could set a prefered different language to every user.

The menu structure sure could be more organized. Chatting should be much more simpler than it is now. The “associate buddy” function is not very handy. The Evolution address book should be access directly. Maybe the budd list itself should be an abstract of the Evolution address book. So Evolution should have also configuration for Jabber servers and so GAIM more or less part of Evolution.

I hate GAIM having to notify me ifI go to “away” status.Maybe I can do this with a setting but this is annoying. Well settings ar really a mess. I think there are a hell too much options. I would like to switch profiles rather: “quiet” or “talkative”